Flowhawk vs Datadog
Datadog covers almost everything a large company runs, and is priced for it. Flowhawk covers the signals an application team uses every day and ties them to business flows. You pay for what you store and what you ask the agent, and hosts aren't counted.
The short version
- Choose Datadog if you need deep infrastructure monitoring across many hosts, network and security products, and hundreds of ready-made integrations.
- Choose Flowhawk if you want your application's flows, traces, logs, errors and incidents in one place at a price you can predict.
Side by side
| Flowhawk | Datadog | |
|---|---|---|
| Organised by | Business flows (checkout, sign-up) and their steps | Hosts, services and products |
| Signals | Traces, logs, metrics, errors, sessions, database queries, AI calls, uptime | All of these and many more products |
| Data format | OpenTelemetry, stored in ClickHouse | Its own agent, with OpenTelemetry support |
| Pricing model | One prepaid balance: storage, investigations and questions | Per host and per product, plus usage |
| Entry price | Pay as you go, about $30 a month for a light 10-person team and $242 for a busy 40-person one | $18 per host for infrastructure plus $36 per host for APM, logs $0.10 per GB plus indexing |
| AI | $1.25 an investigation, $0.25 a question | AI credits from $500 a month |
| Where data lives | Hosted in Germany, your own ClickHouse, or your own cloud account | Datadog's regions |
| Free start | $10 free for 14 days | Free trial |
Where Datadog is stronger
- Many more products, for infrastructure, network, security and synthetic monitoring, and hundreds of integrations.
- Scale and track record at large companies, with certifications such as SOC 2. Flowhawk doesn't have SOC 2 yet.
- Published agents and libraries for every major platform. Flowhawk's own SDKs aren't on the public registries yet. Until they are, you send data with OpenTelemetry.
Where Flowhawk is different
- You start from the flow. You see checkout failing at the payment step and the deploy that changed it, instead of a wall of service dashboards.
- There's no per-host bill. Adding a server or a container doesn't change the price. Storage and agent use do, and a spend cap stops surprises.
- The agent handles the first hour of an incident and proposes a fix, which waits for your approval.
- Your data can stay in your own ClickHouse or your own cloud account.
Moving from Datadog
Send OpenTelemetry to Flowhawk from your services or your existing collector, and import your Datadog dashboards as JSON. See Sending data.